There are many unsung heroes of World War II, who risked their lives to avoid wasting Jews and other persecuted people at great personal cost. Many, as noted by the good historian Sir Martin Gilbert, were religious. But many names are unknown, the rescuers not wanting to attract attention to what they saw because the only possible right thing to do.
One such unsung hero is Pastor Pierre Charles Toureille. He laboured to attempt to help refugees in France. Once the Nazis began to deport Jewish people as a part of the devilish “Final Solution”, he went underground and secretly tried to assist as many as possible escape their clutches.
Toureille’s life began with nothing unusual on the trail of an strange church pastor, although some early influences could have played a task in his later heroics. His affection towards the Czech people and his faith inspired him to write down a thesis on Jan Hus, the fifteenth Century Catholic priest burned on the stake for heresy, considered by some to be the primary Protestant reformer. It was Hus’s courage and faith under persecution that appeared to most encourage Toureille.
Protestants in France were raised on stories concerning the persecution of their forebears, the Huguenots, by the French state. Together with an understanding of the Jews as God’s chosen people, this history would encourage great acts of heroism in people corresponding to Andre Trocme, the pastor who led a complete village, Le Chambon, to cover Jews.
Not that some Catholics – corresponding to Father Jacques, the friar who tried to avoid wasting Jewish children immortalised in Louis Malle’s 1987 film Au revoir les enfants – and Orthodox – corresponding to Mother Maria Skobtsova – didn’t also help the Jewish people in France. Both these heroes would perish in concentration camps consequently of their brave actions to assist the Jews.
But Toureille’s life before these horrors was strange, pastoring Protestant churches in southern France in addition to serving within the French army and raising his five children.
In the Thirties Toureille would participate in ecumenical Christian organisations where there was increasing alarm at events in Europe. He first met a young Dietrich Bonhoeffer at a conference within the early Thirties of the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches, in accordance with the book A rescuer’s story: Pastor Pierre-Charles Toureille in Vichy France by Tela Zasloff.
The disturbing situation in Germany, and debates over pacifist vs violent methods to restrain evil, was ceaselessly discussed in these ecumenical forums. Anti-Semitism was also explicitly condemned. “My father saw the German threat from the start,” Toureille’s son Marc told Zasloff, who remembers his dad advocating for military motion. “He knew straight away, once they were rounding up the Jews a number of years later, that they wouldn’t come back, they were going to be killed. ‘All you could have to do is read Mein Kampf,’ he told us.”
Toureille was first appointed as chaplain to serve the spiritual needs of Protestants inside the growing refugee camp at Nimes in France. As the Nazis persecuted political opponents in addition to Jews, they might flee to neighbouring countries, especially France, which might house 2.5m immigrants by 1936, and arrange its the primary refugee camp by January 1939.
War begins
Once war broke out and France fell to the Nazis, the collaborating Vichy regime would send foreign Jews to those camps, with one estimate that the camps in southern France had 40,000 Jews in a camp of 47,000 by early 1941.
At first it was merely the horrendous conditions in these camps that Toureille would contend with, as he asked the federal government and out of doors aid organisations for resources for the hungry people inside – in addition to for Bibles. His knowledge of varied European languages would help his work, and his excellent memory meant that he didn’t have to write down down incriminating details.
But the numbers of individuals were large and the duty of feeding them difficult. He reported to his boss in 1940 that those within the camps would have just light coffee, watery soup, and 300g of bread and 20-30g of bony meat every day. There was only one blanket between three people, and a few had no clothes in any respect. Typhus and TB would sweep the camps, and the death toll was high. He wrote letters and visited Swiss agencies to attempt to alert them to the desperate situation.
Despite the challenges, Toureille wrote to his boss: “I’m very encouraged in my work with the refugees and I find amongst them great joy as their pastor and truly beautiful souls. I’m grateful to you for having called me to this work. There is nothing else I might reasonably be doing now.”
Yet the pastor and his family didn’t fare significantly better than the inmates. His son Marc recalls “almost nothing to eat but rutabagas [turnips] 3 times a day” and his mother became very unwell in essentially the most difficult winter months of 1940. His children would also feel neglected by their dad. “We resented him for it and it was very difficult for our mother,” said Anne-Marie, the youngest, to Zasloff. “We all the time said he helped strangers and neglected his own children. Later I realised the strangers needed him greater than we did. Without him many would have died; he did lots of good, and I’m happy with it.”
Toureille was officially meant to be taking good care of the Protestants inside the camps and would present his work as such to the authorities, but in point of fact he was helping the desperate Jewish people too.
The people helping refugees were forced to be creative. One method that Toureille and others used was to establish ‘MACE’, supposedly for Christian children but a big proportion were Jewish. Toureille’s own children would spend several years there.
Helping vs the Holocaust
In 1942 the Vichy regime began to deport Jewish people and place them in Nazi hands, which many individuals on the time recognised to be a death sentence. Some Protestant and Catholic leaders – not all – would protest, but to no avail.
So the mission for the righteous Christians modified from openly attempting to help, to undercover rescue, as all official routes for emigration were blocked. From 1942, as Jews in France were rounded up and deported, Toureille and his team would forge visas to present passage via Switzerland to Mexico or Cambodia – or seek for places where Jewish people could hide. They witnessed the Jewish individuals who were working with them “slowly disappear, one after the other” one pastor told Zasloff. Toureille was told to attempt to empty the refugee camps, as they were sitting geese for the Nazis. They became increasingly aware of their terrible fate as rumours of the gassing and mass murder spread, although many found the stories too awful to be believed.
The team can be inspired by their faith to take motion. Toureille wrote: “Let us do not forget that we don’t fight alone. Battling with us is the living God who has a horror of war and infinite pity that extends to the fields of battle, God whose love will disarm all hatred.”
Details of a number of the people helped were obtained by Yad Vashem, the official vehicle for Holocaust remembrance. Because rescuers can be sent to concentration camps in the event that they were caught, like Dutch Christian hero Corrie Ten Boom, and lots of the people they served perished at Nazi hands, corresponding to her sister – those that had the courage to assist Jewish persons are remembered as “The Righteous among the many Nations”. “[Toureille] provided Robert Papst with a forged identification card within the name of Parlier and hired him as a member of his office staff in Lunel,” reveals the Yad Vashem archive. “In the course of 1943-1944, Gestapo agents visited the office to analyze the activities of the clergyman and his staff. Papst’s forged papers spared him from arrest, but Pastor Toureille was interrogated seven times and tortured by the Gestapo on suspicion of aiding Jews.”
Anne-Marie remembers her father looking for places where Jews could escape and even hiding a Jewish man behind a piano. This period seems to have been difficult for the pastor, with Toureille writing to a family in a letter intercepted by the authorities: “I not know what family life is: my five children not know me … I even have sacrificed my health and I even have compromised my status. I even have drawn upon myself, even amongst those whom I need to assist, much misunderstanding and hatred, even amongst my very own associates.”
His activities were noticed by the local police. A report ordered lively surveillance because of his support for Jews and “anti-government” activities, and his premises were searched again and again.
“The Sperbers were one other Jewish couple whose lives were saved by virtue of Toureille’s assistance,” says Yad Vashem. “Toureille attested falsely that they were Protestants and helped them find refuge in an abandoned house within the Alps within the département of Isère. In June 1943, when the Sperbers had a son, the pastor helped them deal with their desperate financial circumstances by repeatedly providing small sums of cash and provisions.”
The end of the war brought joy to all, however the preceding years had taken their toll. Toureille would depart France first for the Czech nation after which the USA, and he showed signs of depression, in accordance with Zasloff.
For the kids who suffered the absence of their father, there would eventually be understanding. “At times I hated him for failing me, for his absence and his infrequent but harsh discipline – as if by this strictness he could make up for lost time,” Marc told Zosloff. “I’m now older and hopefully wiser. I can try to assume the life he had to guide as a way to save so many lives. If we suffered from it, so be it. It was well value it.”
On November 6, 1973, Yad Vashem recognized Toureille as Righteous Among the Nations, nearly three years before his death. Pastor Adolf Freudenberg told the World Council of Churches, as Zasloff reports: “[Toureille] all the time took the best interest within the smallest details of the customarily complicated situations that his parishioners presented to him. Gifted with wealthy and various talents, corresponding to a unprecedented memory and a number of other languages, M. Toureille, in consecrating himself with zeal and devotion to his task, has achieved a remarkable work of charity and of Christian witness.”
Heather Tomlinson is a contract Christian author. Find more of her work at https://heathertomlinson.substack.com or via X (twitter) @heathertomli
